Sebastian Betancur-Montoya
About:
With a landscape architect’s sensibility, the urbanist macro perspective, a maker’s eye for details, and the educator’s sense of social responsibility, Sebastián creates public art masterplans and specific interventions as a curator, visual artist, and project manager interchangeably. He holds a certification in Sculpture Fabrication, a BA in Architecture/Urbanism, and an MA in Museums and Gallery Practice. Working in disparate contexts such as Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East for over 20 years has situated his interests at the intersection of mobility, global politics, and local ecologies.
Working alongside world-class institutions, curators, technical consultants, and installation teams, Sebastián has brought to life permanent and temporary projects with the likes of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomas Sarraceno, Simone Fattal, Ernesto Neto, Nadim Karam, Nadin Ospina, Katarina Fritsch, Ugo Rondinone, Dia al Azzawi, Jeff Koons,
Shilpa Gupta, Hugo Zapata, Olafur Eliasson, and Monira Al Qadiri amongst many other contemporary artists. Such experiences have equipped him with the capacity to develop large scale projects with high levels of complexity while staying true to the aesthetic vision and quality requirements of the artists and funding entities.
Understanding public art beyond a sculptural scale and material’s issue, Sebastian’s curatorial projects have engaged with a wide spectrum of mediums, including performance, installation, text and light-based works. Currently his research proposes a crisis in the traditional formal and material values of public art [solidity, verticality, immutability, preciousness, etc.] and its historical entanglement with power; and instead, puts forward fragility, horizontality, instability, and softness as urgent qualities to be embraced in the public realm.
His work, although mostly associated with permanent pieces of urban sculpture, has also taken shape as exhibitions, research, publications, residencies, workshops, and guerrilla-style installations, and symposiums in Medellín, Nassau, Doha, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Shanghai, NYC, and across the GCC.
Sebastián is originally from Medellin-Colombia and is based in the GCC, he is interested in bridging South-South artistic discourses; particularly, exploring the Latino-Arab commonalities and overlapping social-historical connections. He also works with the Qatar Museums Public Art Program, FIFA Art22 public art initiative, is a lecturer at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Curated the Tuwaiq Sculpture Symposium 2025 in Saudi Arabia, and is currently a co-curator of the Novo Collective’s global public art initiative uncommissioned.
With a landscape architect’s sensibility, the urbanist macro perspective, a maker’s eye for details, and the educator’s sense of social responsibility, Sebastián creates public art masterplans and specific interventions as a curator, visual artist, and project manager interchangeably. He holds a certification in Sculpture Fabrication, a BA in Architecture/Urbanism, and an MA in Museums and Gallery Practice. Working in disparate contexts such as Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East for over 20 years has situated his interests at the intersection of mobility, global politics, and local ecologies.
Working alongside world-class institutions, curators, technical consultants, and installation teams, Sebastián has brought to life permanent and temporary projects with the likes of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomas Sarraceno, Simone Fattal, Ernesto Neto, Nadim Karam, Nadin Ospina, Katarina Fritsch, Ugo Rondinone, Dia al Azzawi, Jeff Koons,
Shilpa Gupta, Hugo Zapata, Olafur Eliasson, and Monira Al Qadiri amongst many other contemporary artists. Such experiences have equipped him with the capacity to develop large scale projects with high levels of complexity while staying true to the aesthetic vision and quality requirements of the artists and funding entities.
Understanding public art beyond a sculptural scale and material’s issue, Sebastian’s curatorial projects have engaged with a wide spectrum of mediums, including performance, installation, text and light-based works. Currently his research proposes a crisis in the traditional formal and material values of public art [solidity, verticality, immutability, preciousness, etc.] and its historical entanglement with power; and instead, puts forward fragility, horizontality, instability, and softness as urgent qualities to be embraced in the public realm.
His work, although mostly associated with permanent pieces of urban sculpture, has also taken shape as exhibitions, research, publications, residencies, workshops, and guerrilla-style installations, and symposiums in Medellín, Nassau, Doha, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Shanghai, NYC, and across the GCC.
Sebastián is originally from Medellin-Colombia and is based in the GCC, he is interested in bridging South-South artistic discourses; particularly, exploring the Latino-Arab commonalities and overlapping social-historical connections. He also works with the Qatar Museums Public Art Program, FIFA Art22 public art initiative, is a lecturer at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Curated the Tuwaiq Sculpture Symposium 2025 in Saudi Arabia, and is currently a co-curator of the Novo Collective’s global public art initiative uncommissioned.